How To Make URL Structure SEO Friendly: Easy Guide

As a business owner, webmaster, blogger, or freelancer with a website, one of your least challenges is creating a website. After you’re done creating your website, you will now be faced with challenges of driving traffic to your website – now that’s the real challenge

When it comes to driving qualified targeted traffic, you need to understand SEO – what it is all about, how it works, how it affects your website, and how to take advantage of it. When it comes to applying SEO on your website, creating an SEO-friendly URL for all your pages and post is one of the easiest optimizations you can do and enjoy the benefits. Unfortunately, most webmasters seem to forget this or don’t know about it.

In fact, you don’t need to look far or search deep before you can see thousands of websites that are making use of incorrect, suboptimal URLs. For many years, SEO-friendly URLs have been a topic of debate. While some argue that your URL structure matters a lot for your SEO benefits, others are of the opinion that it makes little or no difference to your SEO and overall ranking.

What Is SEO-Friendly URL?

SEO-Friendly URL is an URL that explains your article or your website. For an URL to be considered SEO-friendly, it must be easy to read both by humans and search engines. This increases your chances of getting ranked higher in search engines.

In this article, I’m going to take a look at how you can structure your URL to be SEO-friendly so you can enjoy some hidden SEO benefits.

Before we start, let’s take a look at some top reasons why you should always strive to have SEO-friendly URL structure.

Top 4 Reasons to Have SEO Friendly URL Structure

1. Include Your Keyword

Adding your keyword is a sneaky way you can use to boost your post/page relevancy without risking keyword stuffing or making your post hard to read.

When someone runs a query on Google and other search engines, the bot crawler that searches all the website for a relevant keyword will first crawl URLs before the actual pages, it always sends a good message to bot crawlers that your website is relevant to the keyword being searched.

It is a great way to rank high for your keyword without much effort. The great thing is that you can do it without the help of an SEO expert.

2. Make Your URL More Understandable

Come to think of it, when you have relevant keywords in your URL, a visitor won’t struggle to know what your post is all about.

For instance, a visitor that is searching for how to get affordable smartphones won’t have doubt that an URL that says https://smartphones.com/how-to-get-affordable-smartphones is more likely to provide a solution to his problem. You will see more clicks and more visits when your URL is relevant to what the visitor is searching for.

3. Make Your URL Short And Sweet

Short URLs are always sweet and very attractive. Users usually prefer shorter URLs when they want to copy, paste, or remember it later. Moreover, some social networks such as Twitter don’t allow longer URLs. You can easily create short URL with your most important keyword and see more traffic.

4. Match Your URL To Your Title

Since you are most likely going to include your most important keyword in your title, it makes sense that you also include it in your URL. A visitor certainly expects to read what is related to your URL when he clicks on your URL to read your post.

Smart Ways to Make URL Structure SEO Friendly

Now that you’ve known why you need to make your URL SEO-Friendly, let’s get down to how you can actually do it. Below, we have listed some smart ways to make your URL SEO-friendly and enjoy the benefits.

1. Get a Top Level Domain

When it comes to creating SEO-friendly URL, the first thing you should do is get a top-level domain. This means that you need a domain with .com, .net, .org, .biz, .edu, or .info. Getting a top level domain increases your chances for better ranking, with the small impact, but still.

2. Avoid Stop Words

Stops words are ignored by search engines. There is absolutely no need including them since all they do is occupy space and limit your chances of making your URL even shorter. In fact, there was a time when stop words are regarded as a grave sin by search engines. Now, they just ignore them. Stop words include ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘but’, ‘or’, and the rest of them.

3. Keep The Length Short

When you are creating your URL, it is always a good idea to keep it short and memorable. The ideal practice is to use less than 60 characters. In terms of words, I will recommend that you try and shoot for around 3 to 5 words per URL.

Keeping your URL short gives users a good idea of what your content is all about.

4. Search Engines Trust HTTPS

Google and other search engines are placing greater emphasis on online security. In fact, with the new Google algorithm, sites without https will begin to see a drop in ranking as search engines want to reduce the risk of cyber crimes and online security threats.

Getting ‘HTTPS’ instead of ‘HTTP’ shows that the information on your website is encrypted and safe.

5. Keep It Readable With Your Best Keyword

Ensure that you keep your URL readable. It makes sense when a visitor is able to understand your content just by looking at your URL.

For instance; having an URL such as https://smartphone.com/best-android-smartphones/ is good both for your readers and search engine. It contains your keyword and very easy to understand.

Conclusion

Optimizing your URL may seem tricky, but it is always an opportunity to make your post rank higher in the search engine. Start your URL optimization by getting a top-level domain, then move to including your keywords and avoid the use of stop words. Any time you optimize your URL, you improve your chance of getting more search engine traffic.

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